LinkedIn pips Seek on total website visitor numbers, but job-seekers are yet to get networking

Monday, April 18th, 2016

LinkedIn has worked hard to overtake Seek as Australia’s most-visited career website, while Indeed and CareerOne battle it out for third and MyCareer’s transition to Adzuna fails to catch on, Roy Morgan Research website visitation data shows.

3,332,000 Australians 14+ (17%) visited the LinkedIn website in an average four weeks in 2015 (up 60% compared with 2012), while 3,197,000 visited Seek (up 28%). Just over a million Australians visit both websites within the same four-week period, leaving each with over two million exclusive visitors.

With their well-differentiated (and in fact eponymous) positions in the employment category—LinkedIn for linking in as part of a career network and Seek for seeking for a new career—it’s no surprise they reach quite different audiences—but the gaps across segments may be unexpected.

Three quarters of Australia’s nearly 12 million employees are satisfied with their current job—and among this large group, LinkedIn has a clear lead: 23% of satisfied workers visit LinkedIn in an average month, while 17% of them visit Seek.

But with a focus on job listings, Seek has a clear and unsurprising advantage among the 900,000 dissatisfied employees (36% visit Seek vs 27% LinkedIn) and especially the 1.3 million who are unemployed and looking for a job (44% vs 16%). However it’s perhaps notable that Seek also reaches more of the 1.5 million employees who say they are neither satisfied nor dissatisfied (25% vs 23% visiting LinkedIn).

Visitation to Career Websites in 2015:

Indeed and CareerOne are virtually tied in third, each reaching a little over a million Australians overall (5%) as well as the same proportion of satisfied employees. Indeed is slightly ahead among dissatisfied and ‘neither’ employees, as well as people looking for work (albeit in a virtual tie with both CareerOne and LinkedIn when our reach figures are rounded).

3% of Australians visit the Federal Government’s JobSearch website in an average four weeks, but its reach is over four times higher among unemployed job-seekers (13%). Adzuna, a global job listing search engine into which Fairfax Media transitioned MyCareer in 2014, has yet to find much of an Australian audience. Even among its core target market, only 4% of unemployed job-seekers visit Adzuna—well below the one in five who visited MyCareer before the shift.

Of course, around a third of Australians 14+ aren’t even in the workforce—but although they are less likely than those in the workforce to visit career sites, many still do. For example, 6% of Seek’s audience are students and 7% of LinkedIn’s are retirees.

Tim Martin, General Manager – Media, Roy Morgan Research, says:

“Roy Morgan Research has long measured website visitation in Australian population terms, as well as sessions, page views and duration. Measurement of websites, apps, streaming and on-demand services are but just one component of our comprehensive cross-media measurement data.

“Our website measurement also offers seven-day usage figures. This is vital when integrating combined reach with newspaper print readership, radio listening and television viewing—monthly visitation figures are no longer the ideal way to understand audience habits in today’s digital world.

“Single Source also captures just about anything you could ever want to know about the media habits of consumers: their age, gender, location, lifestyle, attitudes, behaviours, and purchasing habits and intentions across the full range of industries.

“To simplify this complexity for businesses and media owners, we have developed some practical psychographic segmentation tools like Values Segments, Technology Adoption Segments, and Helix Personas.

“We are also now preparing to roll out Roy Morgan Audiences, which finally fulfils the inherent potential of digital by measuring and understanding the Australians accessing web pages and apps in real time, and not recounting them when they visit again on a different device another time.”

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Roy Morgan Research

Roy Morgan Research is Australia’s best known and longest established market research and public opinion survey company. Roy Morgan Single Source is thorough, accurate, and provides comprehensive, directly applicable information about current and future customers. It is unique in that it directs all the questions to each individual from a base survey sample of around 55,000 interviews in Australia and 15,000 interviews in New Zealand annually - the largest Single Source databases in the world. The questions asked relate to lifestyle and attitudes, media consumption habits (including TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, cinema, catalogues, pay TV and the Internet), brand and product usage, purchase intentions, retail visitations, service provider preferences, financial information and recreation and leisure activities. This lead product is supported by a nationally networked, consultancy-orientated market research capability.Shaun EllisP: 03 9224 5332W:www.roymorgan.com